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Sunday, 5 February 2017

What To Do For Terrain

Terrain is a big thing in my games and for most tabletop gamers. I do a lot of different games so I need a lot of terrain. Some crosses over but there is a surprising amount of stuff that does not. Things have gotten a bit easier as a lot of games no use much smaller tables, often 3' by 3' rather than 6' by 4'. I usually find wargames tables quite bare. I remember when I started wargaming regularly it was using the Command Decision rules which had vast areas of western Europe, up to half a mile, with nothing on them. It always favoured the Panzer Pixies and more poor old Shermans never got a look in.

I posses vast amounts of terrain. I have about 100 litres of boxes full of the stuff. I don't have as much 28mm terrain. There is a respectable amount but mostly dark age stuff. Some of that will do double duty but not so much. As I am planning games that will need scenery, I thought I'd have a look at what I had planned. Then I realised that I actually had about four different lists for games so I trimmed it down to one.

When I looked at it, I figured the word "trimmed" might not do it justice. It's about five pages long. This would do Sci-fi, modern, post apocalypse, some fantasy (on top of what I already have) and maybe some of what I want for VBCW and Malifaux.

I have acquired a lot of terrain over the years in a fairly ad-hoc manner. What I see is stuff that looks mismatched. What I did with the 15mm terrain (which is all desert) as that I tried to give it a look where everything matched. So I guess this is what I am aiming at now. Now I am looking at the scale of the project. I am just trying to work out how much I would need to do roads and rivers (and tracks and streams and smaller roads and paths and post apocalyptic roads and tracks and rail tracks). I am up to two full sheets of boards (a total 8' by 8') and I am not there yet so almost at three boards. It's a good job I have a table saw.

That wold be just be the beginning. There are fields and broken terrain. A big long list